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The public calls them 'pest-houses, and the Government pronounces them a 'bore. Travellers propose to make them over to Liberia or to any Power that will accept such white elephants. Remains now the task of placing upon the path of progress these wretched West African 'colonies, and of making them a credit and a profit to England, instead of a burden and an opprobrium.
As for coaches, they were scarce used but to carry sick people to the pest-house, and to other hospitals, and some few to carry physicians to such places as they thought fit to venture to visit; for really coaches were dangerous things, and people did not care to venture into them, because they did not know who might have been carried in them last, and sick, infected people were, as I have said, ordinarily carried in them to the pest-houses, and sometimes people expired in them as they went along.
Early in the eighteenth century pest-houses were established at Salem, Massachusetts, at New York, and Charleston, and in 1717, a hospital for contagious diseases was built in Boston.
There were rumors that it cost the Australian Government a tidy sum of money, but the burning of those pest-houses must have risen like incense to heaven, and one very good effect it had, about which there will be no dispute it put the fear of God into the Gyppo, and Australian soldiers after that even singly and in small groups received nothing worse than black looks.
The neighborhood becomes dirty and unhealthy, and the buildings themselves perfect pest-houses. Some of them are neat and tasteful in their exteriors, others are vile and filthy all over. They are now generally built for this purpose. As pecuniary investments they pay well, the rents sometimes yielding thirty-five per cent. on the investment.
In all this dreadful visitation there were, as I have said before, but two pest-houses made use of, viz., one in the fields beyond Old Street and one in Westminster; neither was there any compulsion used in carrying people thither.
On the other hand, the prodigious numbers which would have been sick at a time would have exceeded all the capacity of public pest-houses to receive them, or of public officers to discover and remove them. This was well considered in those days, and I have heard them talk of it often.
"The sons of my ancestors have no fear; and I have shown on the battle-fields of Aboukir and Marongo, and in the pest-houses of Jaffa, that I know not the word. But when one meets a blood-thirsty lion in his path he turns out of the way, and when a tiger extends its talons at one he flies; that is the duty of self-preservation, and not the flight of a coward."
Does the reader wish to hear of the pest-houses, where death is the comforter of the mournful passage of the death-cart of the insensibility of the worthless, and the anguish of the loving heart of harrowing shrieks and silence dire of the variety of disease, desertion, famine, despair, and death?
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